Thursday, 17 April 2014

Avoid the hassle by using an action management system

Overwhelmed by keeping on top of your and others' actions?Think about what normally happens with, say, a meeting. You have minutes which are compiled as a Word document and these have actions against them, assigned to different people. People get a hard or soft copy. Either way, you hit problem No.1; you've got multiple copies.A person may have just a couple of actions, but they are mixed with the actions of others. Then people complete their actions, or maybe not. If they do, they may note on their copy of the minutes what they've done, and they hopefully send it back to the organiser of the meeting. So this poor person has several copies with actions which need to be transposed into the master document. This is wishful thinking.What tends to happen is that valuable time is wasted at the next meeting finding out what has, and what hasn't been actioned. That is problem No.2.And that is just one meeting.Now extrapolate that across your whole business (not just meetings) and you find that:

Time is being wasted by people copying data.

There is confusion with multiple copies; which one is right?

The lack of notification that an action has been completed doesn't mean that it is actually incomplete; it is difficult to track uncompleted actions.

Time is wasted in meetings just finding out what has happened.

You have an absence of management data

With an action management system, like the SSS INTACT Integrated Action Management System, you have:

One set of data which everyone can access (with appropriate security features).

One TO DO list for a person with their actions from all the activities of the business

The person to whom the action is assigned completes and signs off their action using their own action form (which excludes everyone else's actions).

The minutes get automatically updated with the actions taken.

Therefore there is no need to go through all the actions at the next meeting, just those where people have a concern.

And a proper action management system like INTACT will give you automatic reports on actions outstanding, actions overdue and counts of reactive and proactive actions if you are into KPIs.

Now, think about how this can apply not just to meetings, but to:

Customer feedback (both good and bad)

Internal problem reporting (scrap rates, etc.)

Internal audits

Objectives and targets

H,S and E incidents, hazards and accidents

and so on.And you get rid of all those forms and paper reports.

People who have embraced the action management approach find great benefits, not just in time saving and better managerial reports, but in reduction in costs due to internal problems and customer complaints.Find out more about INTACT: http://www.strategicsafety.co.uk/INTACT1.html